Romanticism Era in France at the end of the 18 century

In the XVII-XIX centuries, French society was subjected to a grandiose breakthrough, the culmination of which was the Great French Revolution. For three decades, France has been experiencing turbulent events, which also influenced the development of literature. And for journalism, and for works of art, the main significance was the comprehension of the results and consequences of the French Revolution.

Romanticism in literature is not just one of the most important artistic trends and styles; it can determine the whole culture, the general attitude of the historical era, which began after the French Revolution. In this sense, romanticism manifests not only in literature and general in art but also in all spheres of social consciousness: science, philosophy, religion, politics, even in everyday life.

As almost any significant cultural phenomenon, romanticism poetry does not represent something entirely integral with a constant set of specific features; it is very diverse in its national, genre, chronological varieties. In Marxist literary studies, there was a binary typology: romanticism was divided into revolutionary and reactionary, progressive and conservative, active and passive. This approach is unreasonable, but it simplifies the phenomenon and gives it a non-scientific evaluation characteristic, so it should be considered as highly conventional and obsolete.

Different reasons that had the influence on Romanticism period

Romanticism as one of the most important artistic trends and styles was prevented by some reasons:

1. Political preconditions of romanticism lie in the revolutionary upheavals of the end of the XVIII century: the War of Independence in America 1775-1783 and, most importantly, the Great French Revolution of 1789-1794. Its consequences played a decisive role in the emergence and development of a romantic outlook.

2. Social. For a short time, the revolution created the illusion of universal liberation from centuries of slavery, captive of external circumstances. Almost all the early teens' romances were apologists to the revolution. Many people have turned away from the revolution Jacobin's terror. The freedoms brought by the revolution, as it turned out, did not relate to the sphere of everyday life: it did not prevent society from becoming a bourgeois, a philistine.

3. Historical. In this situation, for many romantics of different generations, the role of the ideological advocate of revolution played the personality of Napoleon, who achieved his military victories of the glory of the romantic genius in politics.

4. Aesthetic sources of romanticism are, first of all, sentimentalism that created the apology of individual feelings, and various variants of pre-romanticism: meditative landscape poetry, Gothic romance and the imitation of medieval poetic monuments.

5. It should be noted separately about the philosophical preconditions, for instance, Rousseau, with his natural person, a cult of nature and a critique of civilization.

Romanticism characteristicsThe main elements of romanticism are:

-The romantic concept of personality is largely determined by the social and spiritual atmosphere that prevailed in the country after the French Revolution and the era of Napoleon.

-The writers capture the idea of the omnipotence of a person, born for freedom and creative search, which equates personality with God.

-One of the main motives is the opposition of the soul to everything void and worldly.

-A special place in the aesthetic considerations of romantics is given to the understanding of the problem of national identity of cultures.

-It requires natural art, which free nature and life. For this, the artist must rely not on knowledge and reason, as a classicist, but on capricious imagination, creative imagination. In romantic writings, expressiveness usually dominates the depictions, expression and grotesque are among the most widely used techniques.

-Denial of rationalism that prevailed in the age of Enlightenment, the cult of human feelings.

-Attention to the personality, its individual rice.

-The rejection of everyday life and glory to "life of the spirit."

- Historism of works and the capture of folklore.

The most outstanding writers that have impacted on the growth of the Romanticism Era in French literature at the end of the 18 century.

Now we want to introduce to your attention the most outstanding romanticism authors:

1.William Wordsworth;

2.Samuel Taylor Coleridge;

3. Lord Byron;

4.Percy Shelley.

The main theme of their masterpieces was The French Revolution. Disappointment in the transience of earthly life has aggravated the retrospective attitude, the aestheticization of the past.

They affirmed the concept of ambivalence - the opposite of the ideal and reality of man and society. The romantic experience was associated with the awareness of the irrationality of being, the irreversibility of the past, the unknown of the future (the popularity of the images of ugliness as the embodiment of the disharmony of the world).

Personality with intense spiritual life has become the central problem of romanticism and learning of the world - self-knowledge. Schelling the first material is not the material world, but the abstract subject, "I." The person's microcosm was perceived as a model of the macro world.

The importance of romanticism is huge in the world history. Romanticism became the first artistic direction in which the awareness of the creative person, as a subject of artistic activity, was revealed. Romances openly proclaimed the triumph of individual taste, the full will of creativity. Granting the creative act of decisive importance, destroying the barriers that restrained the artist's will, they boldly equaled the high and low, tragic and comic, usual and strange.

Being not so much a style, as a social-artistic movement, romanticism opened the way for the further development of art in the 18th century, which took place not in the form of comprehensive styles, but in the form of separate streams and directions. For the first time, the language of art forms was not completely rethought: the style basics of classicism, substantially modified and re-conceptualized in some countries, remained in the known sense. At the same time, the individual will have developed the will of the individual artist within the framework of a single style direction.

About the author: Adriana Johns is a content writer and guest blogger. She is interested in writing the articles and reviews on history, literature, arts, education and other topics. You can read her other publication on Romanticism on artscolumbia.org/art-history/post-classical/romanticism/romanticism-in-france-5182/. Andriana is fond of blogging and is always happy to communicate with readers. So, if you have any questions, feel free to ask her in the comments below.